


some dream giving more than all

by heartslogos



Series: i'd rather fall among the stars [4]
Category: Warframe
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, post the sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-10 16:23:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15295452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartslogos/pseuds/heartslogos
Summary: "meanwhile this ghost goes under, his drowned girthare mountains; and beyond all hurt of praisethe unimaginable night not known" -how dark and single, where he ends, the earthby e.e. cummingsKore expects to see faces. She expects to see - finally - the faces of the people who brought her into being.But maybe the Void is unexpectedly kind, or maybe predictably cruel.Ada and Ama’s faces are blurred out. Gone. No color, no shapes.Forgotten entirely.(A flash of teeth, hot and humid air, and darkness. But that comes later.)





	some dream giving more than all

Kore opens her eyes, yawning as she stretches out. Her knuckles hit metal and a hand runs over her head, warm and soft.

“Go back to sleep, Kore,” he says, “I didn’t mean to wake you. Just checking in, kiddo.”

Kore closes her eyes, turning her head to follow the hand even as it leaves, and she goes back to sleep, arms stretched out over her bed, blankets a comfortable weight, and the now comforting hum of the Zariman around her lulling her back to dreams.

She wakes up again, this time to the sound of humming from Ama’s room. Kore pulls the blanket, soft and  _hers_  because she snuck it into their things when they were packing for the move to the ship even though Ama said not to because they would have blankets  _here_  and it would take up too much space. But Kore brought it because it’s hers and its her favorite, it’s pink and soft and warm and she always falls asleep best with it.

Kore wiggles her toes, stretching out on her bed, yawning and quickly curling up underneath the blanket when she hears Mama’s humming coming closer.

“Kore,” Ama calls through the door, “Kore?”

Kore closes her eyes, and pretends to be asleep.

She hears the door to her room open and Kore tries very hard to look like she’s asleep but Ama’s hands quickly find her and start to dig into her ticklish spots and Kore shrieks out with laughter, flailing to get out of her pink blanket as Ama laughs.

“Good morning, sleepy head,” Ama laughs, as Kore winds her arms around Ama’s neck. Ama kisses Kore’s hair. “Come on, you’ve got classes to get to.”

“Do I have to?” Kore whines, “Can’t I just follow you and Ada?”

“And do what?” Ama laughs, “No. Your job is to go to class and learn and grow and make friends.”

Ama’s voice loses its laughter, “I mean it Kore. Make  _friends_. These people are all we have. You need to learn to connect with them. Get close to them. It’s the only way to be safe.”

“Okay, Ama.” Kore frowns down at her bed, hands curling into the fabric, “I’ll try.”

(But they were all friends already. How is Kore supposed to join them now? In her class she’s the only one who  _isn’t_  the child of a scientist or a soldier or a high ranked Orokin officer. She’s just the daughter of - )

Kore’s mind blanks and as she looks up Ama has already turned around to leave.

 _Who are you_? Kore wants to ask, but that is not how this memory goes.

That is not how this day went.

“You are the daughter of an engine maintenance worker,” Kore’s eyes snap to her left and she sees  _herself_  sitting at her desk chair, leaning back and forth, boots up on her desk and arms crossed behind her head. “Your Ada makes sure the Zariman’s engines are up and running. Your Ama is a maintenance worker for the Zariman’s produce fields on floor Zeda, section thirty two.”

Kore’s mind is blank for a moment, before recognition and understanding falls into place. And awareness comes to her, hooked on sharp barbs and pulled out of the compressed and murky depths of her soul.

“The Man in the Wall,” Kore says. “You’ve been so quiet, I didn’t think we would ever meet.”

The Void Poisoning, from what Kore had witnessed and understood through Judge, was an ever present thing. Judge would see his double - this  _Man in the Wall_ , now that they know the term for it - frequently.

But Kore has never seen this phenomenon  _once_. Until  _now_.

Her face smiles, wry, and it runs a black gloved hand through light pink hair, scratching at its head.

“Well, kid. Honestly? Your little boyfriend is easier to work with than you are. You? You’re a tough shell. Seeing your own face acting out in ways you don’t expect or approve of is nothing to you, clone-killer. That’s old. I had to think up something different to get you to give me the time of day. I had to wait for you to let down your guard. I didn’t think you’d actually come to  _me_  though.”

The Man in the Wall leers at her, “But oh, it has been so worth it. Tough shell but such soft, delicate insides. I’ve been waiting to crack you for  _centuries_.”

Kore glares at her copy, tossing back the blankets and standing up. She examines her arms - thinner, narrower. She curls her fists and they feel softer, somehow.

How strange. She never realized it until now.

They really  _were_  children when they were on the Zariman.

(Centuries of being tool, a weapon, a possession, a  _monster_. Centuries of it. It somehow made her… _forget_  what their source material was. Children.

A flash of the children running and playing at being Grineer and Warframe around Cetus, and Kore’s mind twists for a moment. Confused with the juxtaposition. Was Kore ever like that? Was Judge? Chic? Punk? Empress? Alpha? The proof is in front of her, but somehow - it seems so very far away and different.

Empty.)

“So. The good old days, huh?”

Kore ignores it and goes to her door, because she knows what day this is.

She told Umbra that they must let go of these memories, consign them to the Void. Empty themselves.

And Kore is no hypocrite.

So she goes to her door and closes her eyes and leans her forehead against the cool metal and listens as the memory unburies itself and comes alive for her. Not quite forgotten, but denied, for so, so long.

“It’s not like a band aide, you know,” the Man in the Wall says, “It isn’t easier if you rip it off  _faster_.”

Kore doesn’t know if her memory really is this good, or if it’s some sort of assistance from the Void - the gestalt of memories and pain and talents that each and every Tenno have poured into it - but she can hear them now. Even though she’s sure that she probably wasn’t paying any attention at the time, not enough to get this detail.

“Why did they call you in so early?” Ama asks.

Ada hesitates before his voice, deeper and harder to hear, answers, “There’s something wrong with the Zariman’s life support systems. They were thinking that something was wrong with our perpetual engine causing a feedback loop and overworking the filtration, but there’s nothing wrong with the engines or power generators at all. We checked the entire thing over, the connections, the ports, the power lines, the mechanics, everything. Nothing. Have you noticed anything in the fields?”

“No - I. Well,” Ama pauses, “It’s nothing very big or troubling. It’s just that - sometimes systems will flicker. Or sounds will echo quite far. A lot of us hear things. Tricks, probably, from the silence, but it does make you uneasy after a bit. When do you think we’ll be able to contact the home systems? Surely they must have received our distress signal by now.”

Kore feels her eyelashes as her closed eyes flicker and she raises her hand to the panel that will open the door.

“Good luck,” the Man in the Wall says, barely audible underneath the sound of the door hissing open.

Kore expects to see faces. She expects to see - finally - the faces of the people who brought her into being.

But maybe the Void is unexpectedly kind, or maybe predictably cruel.

Ada and Ama’s faces are blurred out. Gone. No color, no shapes.

Forgotten entirely.

(A flash of teeth, hot and humid air, and darkness. But that comes later.)

But she knows that they’re smiling right now. She knows they’re smiling as they look at her, putting on brave faces like adults do. Should. Are supposed to do for their children.

Kore kneels down at the table with them, feeling very surreal as she looks at the table with the food, and prepares to eat with them.

These people loved her. Once.

She loved them back. Once.

“But you killed them anyway,” the Man in the Wall says from somewhere to her right, “And it wasn’t mercy, was it?”

It's probably for the best that she moves through the rest of this quickly. This isn’t what she needs to deal with, this is not the heavy weight trapped in murky darkness. It is not her day at school, nervous of the other kids and scared to talk to them. It isn’t her relief at coming home and waiting for her parents to come back from their work shifts. It isn’t Ada tucking her in and Ama telling her stories. It isn’t that.

It’s not this that Kore needs to release. It has never been this - the forgotten details, the everyday life - that haunted her, that she forced and pressed and pushed and condensed down into the pit of her mind and soul and heart.

It was what happened  _later_.

Just like it wasn’t the pain, the suffering, the changes that were put on Umbra. It was the threats, it was the games, it was losing his son.

It wasn’t the Zariman, it wasn’t the loneliness at school, it wasn’t even coming out of the Void and becoming a soldier.

It was this.

The room is hot. Humid. The walls are damp with condensation, with heat, with the strange protrusions of  _flesh_  that have inexplicably grown where there shouldn’t be anything organic.

The room is dark. All the rooms are dark. Everything is dark, now. Lighting systems have long switched to emergency power and the most basic of functions. The air recycling system still works, but the disease continues to spread. The madness.

Now, Kore can see their faces.

These are the faces she remembers.

These are the faces that haunt her.

If Kore once looked like her parents, she does not anymore. What was there of her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her cheeks, her ears - gone.

Ama’s hair has long fallen out, or melted, twisted, mutated into something else. Something hard and brittle. Her teeth are gleaming squares that shine in the low emergency lighting past her parched and peeled back lips.

Ada’s eyes are glazed over, milky, and his skin is pock marked and his hands are curled, rigid.

“Kore,” Ada rasps, beckoning her closer, “ _Kore, come_.”

“No,” Kore says, standing with her damp palms pressed against the damp wall that seems to breathe and undulate against her.

Her skin is so hot. Her chest is hot. Everything is so overwhelmingly hot and her skin burns and aches like it does when she has a fever.

But Ama’s hands are not cool to soothe it.

Ada’s voice is not gentle to sing it away.

Ama’s legs have withered into sticks, her feet curled and crumpled as she drags herself along the floor with her clawed hands, reaching for her.

“ _Kore, come_ ,” Ama’s voice croaks out, “Kore, let me see you.  _Come here_.”

“No,” Kore repeats, the heat in her chest spreads because she is afraid.

So very, very afraid.

“Open the door,” Kore says, “Let me get help. Please.”

It is hard to track time in space. Especially with so many of the ship’s functions gone. But ever since Ada got his fever and couldn’t work, Ama’s fears grew louder, stronger, more powerful.

There were voices in the walls. The Orokin from the home system were watching them. It was all a test. A trick. A cruel game. But they wouldn’t get Ada. Or Kore.

Because Ama had locked them in and Ama would protect them.

But Ada got sicker and so did Ama and Kore thinks that she’s going to get sick too, and then  _her_  skin will turn black and angry red and start to blister and peel and crack like Ama and Ada’s, leaking strange clear but sour smelling fluid as their hair falls out and their lips peel.

And Kore is very afraid.

Why hasn’t anyone come to help them? They would have missed roll call so many times.

Where is every body?

“They’re all in the same boat you are, mostly,” the Man in the Wall reminds her, “Except for the ones that are eating each other. Or dead.”

The Man in the Wall is standing just past Ada, looking down at him with curiosity, “Don’t you want to know how you look like in comparison?”

Kore doesn’t remember what she looked like before the Void. If her hair was still pink, if her eyes were still these colors. All she knows is that she didn’t have the raised ridges of blue-green skin around her eyes that gave her the name  _Persephone_.

Ada beckons her, “Come, Kore. Let us sleep.”

“No,” Kore repeats, and closes her eyes and wishes that she could get to the worst part.

“Your wish, my command, are you sure you don’t want to give your Ama one last kiss?” the Man in the Wall taunts.

Kore opens her eyes and they are worse than before.

And this - this is what Kore sees, remembers,  _feels._ This is the heart-pounding chain wrapped around her neck.

Monsters.

Like Kore becomes after this.

There is nothing of what were parents in them. She can’t recognize their shapes at all. They would be Infested if they weren’t so gaunt, so warped, so sharp angled and skeletal.

There are no longer any words. Just grunts. Groans. Dry screeches.

The walls are covered in scratches from their skeletal hands, nails hardened and broken and jagged.

Here is the moment where Kore’s door finally breaks under their assault and Kore stands there with them in front of her and  _hungry_  and the door just beyond and still locked.

The moment is frozen.

Kore closes her eyes and breathes in. Breathes out.

The air is hot. Diseased. Humid. And stale.

“Ready, kiddo?” the Man in the Wall asks. “I mean, it’s already happened. But you ready anyway?”

Kore opens her eyes and for a moment - she, too, is watching this. Not in it. But just for a moment, and then the action is hers again.

They look a little like the Teralyst with their thin, gangly limbs as they come towards her, mouths open, eyes wide and almost glowing.

Kore barely scrambles out of the way, and one of their sharp finger-claws scratches against her ankle, cutting through her protective suit but not quit getting through the inner lining.

She rolls, just managing to get back onto her feet and run towards the door when their heavy, hot weight slams her from behind and she hits the wall, dazed.

She can’t even tell them apart anymore. Ada and Ama are just a  _they_  now. They press down at her, hands thin but strong in desire as their mouths part to reveal dark gums and Kore raises her arms just as teeth descend.

She cries out as teeth sink into her forearm and nails scratch against her face.

Her eyes squeeze closed and her heart beats fast, so fast, so hot, so  _searingly bright on her eyelids_.

She kicks out and hits flesh and she hears a guttural and croaking cry of protest before her foot is seized and teeth sink into her calf.

Kore screams out and tries to pull her limbs away, she kicks with her other leg and tries to dislodge the mouth attached to her legs all the while the hands and mouth on her arms sink in and start to twist.

With time and understanding to detail, Kore now realizes that the intent was to twist her arm off.

That doesn’t happen.

Kore is crying. Or at least, in this memory, at the time, Kore is crying.

It’s pain. It’s fear.

But it isn’t sadness.

Kore opens her eyes and she sees diseased flesh. Not a face. A throat. She sees what was once a throat, she sees the tendons of the neck and the jaw clenched around her arm and she can see the hand that descends on her throat, pinning her down and choking her.

She struggles, but her arms are barely holding up and she can’t get the hand off of her throat.

The humid stale air chokes her further as she tries to wheeze, gasp for more.

Her arm is twisting painfully as the mouth pulls up, spittle and drool sliding over the protective suit Kore had put on after sealing herself in her room.

She can’t breathe.

She continues to try and flail out, but she can feel herself beginning to falter, grow weak under the assault and lack of air.

“If only you could have died here,” the Man in the Wall muses, looking down at her with amusement, “Wouldn’t that have been  _swell_?”

Kore’s vision begins to blur.

The arm that isn’t caught in teeth scrambles against the hand pinning her down to no use. Twisted and pinned in this position, she can’t even reach.

As her vision blurs and whites out, she sees specks of gold.

Her fingertips curl and it is overwhelmingly hot.

Kore’s eyes close, or maybe she just can’t see anymore, because it goes dark.

And then, very, very  _bright_.

There is screeching, there is howling, and there is a quick and sudden release as Kore can breathe again.

Her eyes open and the world glitters gold and as her vision focuses she sees them feet away from her, thrown back, with smoke coming off of them as they hiss and whine, shaking their heads like dazed creatures.

But they rally. Of course they do.

Even as Kore sits up, adrenaline pumping through her, body glowing, she sees them getting ready to attack again.

Kore holds up her hands.

She doesn’t give them that chance.

It would have been nice if it were clean. If she burned them out of the world with nothing left. If it was fast. Quick. Painless. But it wasn’t.

Kore didn’t know how to do those things then. Kore wasn’t trained to think about that kind of thing.

At the time, Kore could only hold up her hands and  _hope_. She burned shallow holes in them. They kept coming because that wasn’t enough.

But eventually she got them weak enough that she could put her hands on them and  _pour it in_.

She put her hands on one of their heads and she grit her teeth and squinted against the light as she burned, melted, and bore through skin, flesh, muscle, and bone. The entire time what was once either her Ama or Ada screamed and howled and clawed at her skin, her suit, every part it could reach.

It was slow.

She had to let go and run, dodge, fight off the other one, and start the process over on whatever part of the head she could reach.

Five, six, seven pairs of her hands burnt into their flesh as she wore them down. One by one.

It could have been minutes. It could have been hours.

By the time Kore was done she was covered in sweat. Her skin buzzed.

And there was blood everywhere.

But it was over.

Kore stands there in the flesh and bone and ash mess of what used to be her parents, hands held out in front of her and still steaming, fizzling.

The only sound is her breath. Fast and shallow.

Everything buzzes. Fizzes. Sparks.

She steps over their bodies one shaking step at a time until she’s at the door.

And she puts one burning hand on it and slowly melts it open. Now that, she remembers took much longer. Even if it was stationary.

Kore kept checking over her shoulder to make sure that they were dead. Did they move? Was that a twitch? What was that sound?

Did it just say her name? No?

Her hands shook.

They are dead.

Her hands rest flat on the door as she melts it open, golden energy pouring out of her onto the metal.

Kore closes her eyes and opens them.

She is sitting crammed in with dozens of other children. Some cry. Some mutter. Some argue and shout.

She doesn’t know if it is better or worse than silence. In her head there is buzzing, fizzling, crackling. her hands remain clamped to her sides a she holds herself, palms pressed against her ribs.

Her head feels like a vast and looming empty space with pressure that pushes against her skin.

She can feel her heart beat through her palms.

She’s alive.

A child cries and Kore ignores it. Ignores everything as she focuses on her hands, her heart, her head.

And then someone snaps, yells, “Leave him alone! What are you - an animal? Just because you’re bigger than everyone doesn’t mean you’re in charge!”

Kore looks up because she remembers this too - this she never forgot - and she watches Judge rush in to save a stranger because that’s what he does. She watches him get punched, she watches him punch back.

“And there he is, your boy.”

Kore turns expecting to see herself, but it’s another Tenno, looking straight at her. “I told you. The tricks I use one that one don’t work on you. I’ve got to keep you on your toes. So. Patricide? Matricide? How’s it feeling?”

Kore turns back to watch Judge get beat up and beat up someone else.

She breathes.

They were animals. They were going to kill her and eat her.

And if she died, she would not have seen this. She would not have seen him and remembered him and survived through Margulis and Ballas. She would not have come out of it all to find Judge again and become a member of Steel Meridian and hunt scans for Sanctuary and unbury Ordan Karris. If Kore did not do what she did then, she would not be where she is and Kore believes with everything in her that this is where she needs to be. With Judge.

Kore breathes and slowly unspools herself and stands.

As she watches the memory of Judge get beat and beat in return, she allows the previous memory of heat and darkness and fear run through her again and again, until it runs through her clean and undisrupted.

Kore holds the memory in her mind and lets it go through her, she lets herself go through it, over and over and over and over. As many times as it takes, and reminds herself that those moments do not become her. Those moments were  _not_  the turning point in her life. They were not her peak, they were not the moment that decided everything for her.

If there is such a moment it is maybe this one, or maybe being transferred to Ballas, or maybe becoming a Saryn, or maybe centuries past this when she wakes up free for the first time, or maybe standing out on the plains of Cetus and looking at the moon, or maybe it’s even the moment right now where she lets this memory leave her.

She cannot be trapped by this one  _blink_  in the relative span of her life.

There is purpose in her survival. And it isn’t to be ashamed, it isn’t to be afraid, and it isn’t to hesitate over her choice to live.

So Kore breathes and allows this memory to become so rote that it becomes background noise. And she is herself again. Kore, Persephone. Untouchable.

“I did what I had to do.” She’s said this to herself, out loud, to Judge, before. And now? She’s even convinced of it. “I killed them. I wanted to live, so I killed them.”

Kore looks the Man in the Wall dead in its fake imposter eyes.

“I don’t regret it. I don’t feel sorry for it.”

Did she have a choice? Maybe. Could she have made it less brutal? Maybe.

Did she? No.

She can’t change that anymore.

Kore pulls back and away from this memory, until she is kneeling in darkness with the faint touch of Umbra and Saryn and Nidus and all the rest of her frames lingering like specters around the back of her mind.

She holds the memory in her hands. Her hands are stronger. Her real hands. Her current hands. They are still the hands that killed the things that her parents became. But they are different hands.

“It was me,” Kore says. “I killed them. And I did it without thinking.”

Was she born to be a weapon? Was it in her all along?

“But I am no longer there,” Kore continues. “It happened. It’s over. I release it.”

Not forgetting. Not denying or repressing.

It happened. Just like how Isaah’s death happened.

Kore can’t use this as fuel for her actions. To what end? Revenge? Against what? As purpose? To  _do_  what? As incentive? For what goal?

What use does a sword need of shame? What use does an arrow need of guilt? What use does a staff need of fear?

None.

It is an event that happened, and like water, it must flow through and away instead of building like a dam.

So Kore lets the memory flow through her, and finally pass her by. And as it passes, she feels the emotions begin to leave her. She makes sure they take nothing with them.

Kore feels the fear slide away from her, the adrenaline fading, she feels the shock and the anxiety and the horror fall away completely. A weight that she didn’t realize the extent of until it left.

It is not quite acceptance.

(Kore thinks that’s what Judge would have done, accepted it and built it into apart of himself and moved on.)

Kore can’t do that. She can’t weave this into herself. Kore can’t keep this kind of anger and fear and shame in her. It would eat and her and she would eat at it in a violent circle.  So Kore must do what is best for herself, and that is to consign it to a distant self.

Her voice echoes with the imagined sense of a dozen other voices - more feelings than voice - as she holds the memory out and lets it pour through her fingers, “We return this memory to the Void and find peace in our emptiness.”

A single star drifting away from her even as it is tied to her.

“You can keep this,” Kore says to the empty spaces of her heart, to the Void itself, “I don’t need it anymore.”

She stands and turns, the Man in the Wall waits, hands folded behind its back, eyes bright and curious.

“So?” It tilts its head. “Feeling better?”

“Yes, actually,” Kore replies, and then waves a hand, dismissing the Man in the Wall entirely as she steps back out of her mind into herself.

Once more she is surrounded in the familiar. The sound of her aquariums, the engine of her Orbiter, the sound of her life support systems putting through recycled air, and the faint drums that Ordis had put on for her to meditate to.

She feels a hand on her head, textured and firm. Her eyes open and Umbra pauses, pulling his hand back.

Umbra tilts his head.

Kore reaches out and puts her hand on his chest, feeling the warmth of her Void energy passing through them both, back and forth, back and forth.

“It is done,” Kore says, feeling around herself for the memory of death. She feels the place where it was, heavy and shameful. But she no longer feels it.

It has been released. It cannot hurt her any longer.

“Now we prepare,” Kore says to Umbra, to Ordis, “The Sentients  _will_  come back. And this time we will finish what we started.”


End file.
